The Parent Trap: Four New Novels Take Measure of the Urban Family

Now that Bugaboo strollers and farmer’s markets have officially taken over our cities, we find out there may be a brewing ennui behind the idyllic façade. As it turns out, urban parenting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—or so four satires of a certain brand of domestic privilege would have us believe.Bernadette Fox was once a MacArthur-winning architect, but now she’s a Seattle mom suffering from a case of neurosis so acute she employs a personal assistant in Delhi to make restaurant reservations. Her sudden disappearance sets Maria Semple’s delightfully droll second novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Little, Brown and Company), a-spin, and it quickly falls to Bernadette’s alarmingly self-possessed eighth-grade daughter, Bee, to solve the mystery. As Bee assiduously goes through her mother’s e-mails and faxes to trace the precise trajectory of her disgrace, Semple, a former Saturday Night Live and Arrested Development writer, cuts a wry slice of a life—one that’s populated by private-school helicopter parents, obsessively eco-conscious neighbors, and green-juice swilling, TED-talking husbands—and one that’s sharp enough to make us feel slightly relieved about not having to live anywhere quite so bucolic.

The legendarily ultracompetitive parents of Brooklyn’s Park Slope may be starting to show signs of strain, according to Amy Sohn’s Motherland (Simon & Schuster), whose characters are tempted to flee the “land of child-rearing and nurturing and nonstop care” for other, more soothing geographies: pharmaceuticals, old flames, and gentlemen of the healing arts industry. Across the sea, upper-class problems don’t seem all that bad, except for the pesky paparazzi: A financial scandal tests the loyalties of a babysitter and her employers—a millionaire banker and his wife—in Slummy Mummy author Fiona Neill’s What the Nanny Saw (Riverhead), which features a beautiful Central London town house and a dinner-party cameo by Elton John—perhaps enough to indicate where the nanny’s sympathies might ultimately fall. And then there are the urban fathers, prey to being emasculated by their wives’ success enough to need to cheat on them. In journalist Karl Taro Greenfeld’s sparkling fiction debut, Triburbia (Harper), a kind of Real Househusbands of Tribeca, he skewers the smug and Snuggied of one Manhattan neighborhood, where “faux-bohemian” fathers meet for breakfast and self-aggrandize—and in their spare time, raise children. In flashes, entertain their own sense of existential doom. “Here’s what’s wrong with us: There’s nothing at stake.”